In sections of the Internet populated by under-30s, one piece of advice has become common: romanticise your life. Take the good things you have and view them more positively — while also, at the same time, making changes to your living situation that will get you closer to the life of your dreams.
On Instagram, you will find millions of posts from (mostly) young women saying how all their problems were solved by following this guidance. On TikTok, videos on the subject have more than 1.4 billion views. In these clips, though, you won’t find advice on how to live a life that is exciting and fulfilling, or punctuated by surprise, newness and glamour. Instead, you will find millions of young people describing an ideal life that is overwhelmingly dull, fundamentally rooted in living each day the same, and following a narrow, regimented routine.
This mundane view of a perfect life elevates tedious activities to the status of aspirational living. Your best life will be accessed by taking “pretty pictures,” wearing matching pyjama sets, cooking dinner at home, working out at 5am, buying flowers, lighting candles, stretching. By most measures, these activities are plainly boring, but videos of bedtime routines, trips to coffee shops (often Starbucks), or even just lists of “ways to romanticize your life” have become suffocatingly ubiquitous. Many have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times. Some influencers will even post multiple videos of the same routine in the space of a few weeks knowing it guarantees engagement (one particularly popular TikTok, which advises viewers to read in the morning and burn sage, currently has over 1 million views).
Photo: AP
This pervasive inclination towards dullness is also reflected in young people’s taste in celebrities. The monochromatic, beige aesthetics of influencers such as Molly-Mae Hague and Matilda Djerf have earned them millions of young fans (Hague owns a famously beige home and is known for her bland, fast-fashion wardrobe; Djerf founded a multimillion-dollar clothing brand selling luxury basics), but they are popular precisely because they embody a way of life that is not merely about aesthetics.
Hague, Djerf and similar celebrities promote a brand of balanced living that involves punishingly healthy routines featuring the occasional glass of white wine, renovating and decorating neutral-toned homes, committing to long-term monogamous relationships, buying expensive fluffy animals and opting for nights in over nights out. Many of these celebrities openly marvel at the fact that they have become so famous despite their lives being so boring.
There are obvious external factors that play into why some young people have become enamoured of these unremarkable routines. In these tightly structured lifestyles, they may glimpse a form of security that can otherwise feel absent in a period marked by economic and political turmoil. The noise of social media may also make quieter lives seem more appealing.
Photo: AP
When a video went viral on Twitter earlier this month showing a 28-year-old man’s typical workday — featuring a trip to the office, then the gym, then home to heat a ready meal and playtime with his dog, posted with the caption “This video was so depressing that I started tearing up watching it” — people were quick to criticise the poster’s sentiment. A home, a steady 9-5 with a salary and flexibility, a gym membership and a pet: who wouldn’t want these things, when so much of life is defined by chaos?
When the world feels tumultuous, people reach for what seems like control. But I’m not sure that the appeal of these insipid beige-fluencers can be entirely explained by a yearning for stability. There’s a quiet conservatism in the valorization of their routines and a sanctimonious tone adopted by those who follow them. This fits with a less reported narrative emerging about Gen-Z: despite their reputation for social liberalism, many young people champion a more puritanical approach to things such as sex, dating, and drinking.
Heteronormative, conventional lifestyles have long been regarded as more socially acceptable than straying from this path, but conventionality has now been granted a pious, aspirational element, as if this isn’t how people have been encouraged to live for centuries. All of this feeds into pre-existing fear and caution around trying anything new: leading a boring, low-risk life is easier than going out in the world and trying to lead an exciting one; and it only becomes more appealing when that safe life is treated as morally superior.
It all feeds our increasingly limited monoculture, in which everything and everyone begins to look the same. Of course, these aesthetics and lifestyles are also incredibly profitable for the people and companies who peddle them (both Hague and Djerf have built lucrative careers from monetizing the lives they portray on their Instagram feeds). Some influencers use this appeal to sell fake tan and linen trousers; others get their followers to spend thousands on “romanticize your life” wellness retreats. We are told we’re being given the tools for empowerment by people who really just want to sell us cream-coloured office wear and sweatpants.
This banal, lobotomized vision of life contains a false promise: that if we subscribe to its version of monotony, this will somehow bring us deep satisfaction. But the idea of what our world could be should only be expanding — not being whittled down to fit the narrow messaging of mass culture. Even if it does feature morning workouts and early bedtimes, life shouldn’t be so rigid and boring. It should be diverse and fulfilling; it should be fun. We should be wary of those trying to convince us that anything less is the best the world has to offer.
Nov. 11 to Nov. 17 People may call Taipei a “living hell for pedestrians,” but back in the 1960s and 1970s, citizens were even discouraged from crossing major roads on foot. And there weren’t crosswalks or pedestrian signals at busy intersections. A 1978 editorial in the China Times (中國時報) reflected the government’s car-centric attitude: “Pedestrians too often risk their lives to compete with vehicles over road use instead of using an overpass. If they get hit by a car, who can they blame?” Taipei’s car traffic was growing exponentially during the 1960s, and along with it the frequency of accidents. The policy
What first caught my eye when I entered the 921 Earthquake Museum was a yellow band running at an angle across the floor toward a pile of exposed soil. This marks the line where, in the early morning hours of Sept. 21, 1999, a massive magnitude 7.3 earthquake raised the earth over two meters along one side of the Chelungpu Fault (車籠埔斷層). The museum’s first gallery, named after this fault, takes visitors on a journey along its length, from the spot right in front of them, where the uplift is visible in the exposed soil, all the way to the farthest
While Americans face the upcoming second Donald Trump presidency with bright optimism/existential dread in Taiwan there are also varying opinions on what the impact will be here. Regardless of what one thinks of Trump personally and his first administration, US-Taiwan relations blossomed. Relative to the previous Obama administration, arms sales rocketed from US$14 billion during Obama’s eight years to US$18 billion in four years under Trump. High-profile visits by administration officials, bipartisan Congressional delegations, more and higher-level government-to-government direct contacts were all increased under Trump, setting the stage and example for the Biden administration to follow. However, Trump administration secretary
The room glows vibrant pink, the floor flooded with hundreds of tiny pink marbles. As I approach the two chairs and a plush baroque sofa of matching fuchsia, what at first appears to be a scene of domestic bliss reveals itself to be anything but as gnarled metal nails and sharp spikes protrude from the cushions. An eerie cutout of a woman recoils into the armrest. This mixed-media installation captures generations of female anguish in Yun Suknam’s native South Korea, reflecting her observations and lived experience of the subjugated and serviceable housewife. The marbles are the mother’s sweat and tears,
RSS